What marketers can learn from Ben and Jerry’s Schweddy Balls

September 23rd, 2011 by Dan Clifford


When I learned that Ben and Jerry launched a new flavor called Schweddy Balls, it put a smile on my face. I appreciated that the brand provided me with an unexpected and fun memory of a classic Saturday Night Live skit. Here’s a brand that knows how to have some fun, even if they risked offending a few people along the way.

And of course they did. “One Million Moms,” an organization affiliated with the American Family Association, says it’s offended by the ice cream’s “vulgar flavor” and in response they’re organizing a boycott. As a marketing and user experience professional I admire the boldness of Ben and Jerry’s management in connecting with their core audience. Connecting with a core audience often comes at the expense of alienating others.

The company made a number of comments to the press, but my favorite was this: “Our fans get the humor.” Ben and Jerry’s is now owned by a British-Dutch Unilever conglomerate, but boy are they good at reinforcing the brand equity that was established in the early days.

What can we learn from Ben and Jerry’s Schweddy (ahem) Balls? A brand needs to form a close personal connection with customers. This has always been the case, but is more so in this era of social media. Shallow, in-personal connections won’t stand up in the long-run to competition. Often deep connections are formed precisely because other groups are alienated. We don’t always admit it, but we form friendships largely because friends like the same things we do, and they dislike the same things we dislike.

Ben and Jerry’s is a company that was started by two Vermont hippies wearing tie-die. They were irreverent from the beginning. They were buying from sustainable farms 20 years before “sustainable” became a P.R. buzzword. With their innovative and in-your-face “What’s the Doughboy Afraid Of?” campaign they took on the huge Pillsbury Company when it tried to enforce exclusive distribution (and won). The company has established a reputation for doing things differently, for having fun and being irreverent. Releasing controversial ice cream flavors taps squarely into that brand equity.

Based on years of research, Marketing author and Kellogg professor Philip Kotler boils success in marketing down to two rules, which are basic but tough to implement:

    1) Clearly differentiate your brand’s positioning
    2) Get closer to your target customers by adding superior value

This much-talked-about new flavor release allowed the company to further differentiate itself and get closer to their core customers. Nice work Ben and Jerry.

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AnswerLab Partners with Clients at UPA’s 2011 Designing for Social Change Conference

April 12th, 2011 by Tanya Bashaw

The past year has been a busy one at AnswerLab. A broad spectrum of client projects, as well as our own mobile research study, provided a wealth of research opportunities, challenges and insights. As the conference season hits full swing we are excited to have the opportunity to share some of these experiences with a broader audience.  Usability Professionals’ Association’s annual international conference happens in June and AnswerLab is busy collaborating with clients for four speaker sessions for the event.
We will present on a range of mobile learnings and best practices – from mobile ethnographies to mobile gaming- as well as sharing what we’ve learned from our partnerships with interactive agencies.

Here’s a peek at what we have planned:

Into the Wild: Uncovering Holistic Mobile Insights, presented by Amy Buckner (AnswerLab), Pamela Walshe (Wells Fargo Bank)

Understanding and connecting with mobile consumers is a huge challenge. We’ll highlight a compelling case study of a major financial institution’s need to understand the consumer experience across their mobile platforms (mobile apps, mobile site, and SMS banking) and how creative user research revealed deep insights. There will be a hands-on, group activity for learning best practices with mobile ethnography work.

Innovating Mobile Research: A Practical Introduction to Mobile & Tablet User Testing, presented by Danaus Chang (AnswerLab), Kuldeep Kelkar (PayPal)
Thanks to changes in the mobile device landscape and rise of ubiquitous connectivity, mobile user experience testing is both a necessity and a challenge. In this talk we’ll go into the logistics of setting up an in-person mobile usability study, demonstrate various set ups and share example findings.

How Research Plays: The UX of Mobile Gaming, presented by Sal Becerra (AnswerLab), Laura Smith (Electronic Arts)
Measuring the UX of mobile gaming is a challenge calling for research beyond usability. We highlight a compelling case study of how a leading game developer incorporated a holistic UX approach within their agile mobile-game development and how a creative user-research approach established a benchmarking framework to assess future products.

Working in Harmony with Interactive Agencies and End Clients, presented by Danaus Chang (AnswerLab), Charles Wiedenhoft (Red Door Interactive )
How do you ensure that your UX research provides insights that answer both interactive agency and stakeholder demands. We’ll share an in-depth case study demonstrating how to set up a UX research project to work harmoniously with both interactive agencies and end clients.

We’re looking forward to celebrating UPA’s 20th anniversary with an inspiring group of presenters attendees. If you’re heading to the conference in June please stop by the AnswerLab booth and say hello.

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Hover Menus Can Result In Surprise And Delight

April 11th, 2011 by Donovan Watts

During a recent study, one of our clients requested that I show several sites to each participant in order to get their feedback on navigation styles. As this was a qualitative study, there weren’t enough participants to base the decision for which navigation style to move forward with but the point was merely to gather some general feedback to help the designers see things from the point of view of the participant.

Interestingly enough, this was around the same time that UX Movement posted the article, ‘Why Hover Menus Do Users More Harm Than Good.’ The article has some good examples of problems that can occur with menus that open upon hover rather than a click.

I agree with much of the article but I’ve heard from lots of users, from the study I referred to earlier and many more, that they like having a hover menu for exploration’s sake. This author recommends clicking first but that eliminates the ability for a user to simply explore a site’s offering by hovering. Some of the users in my study were quite vocal about their satisfaction with discovering ‘what lies below’ without having to click.

I think there is value in a hover state for simple menu structures. When properly executed, it surfaces the breadth of site offerings that a user may not have clicked to see (or expected to find under the navigation title) and can result in one of those surprise & delight moments of discovering available content.

But, as the author points out, complicated states that force users down a hard to follow tunnel is very annoying.

Ultimately, there are downsides to hover states but, like most things, there are upsides as well. When in doubt, research it.

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Marketers Place Emphasis On Digital Experiences – UX Research Ensures They Deliver

February 16th, 2011 by Sally Cohen

In late summer/early fall 2010, AnswerLab partnered with the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) to collect data about marketers’ priorities for 2011 and beyond for SoDA’s annual Digital Marketing Outlook. The study includes survey findings from over 650 marketers, agencies and technologists across the digital landscape that reveal their strategic priorities, budget plans, and hiring strategies.

The data reveal some interesting takeaways for those of us in the user experience world. First, and most importantly, marketers continue to shift their budgets, efforts, and head count toward digital channels. More specifically, marketers are:

  • Putting their dollars and headcount – both in-house and outsourced – behind emerging channels like social networks and mobile apps.
  • Increasingly focused on creating digital brand experiences.
  • Putting less emphasis on metrics like CPM, page views and click throughs and concentrating instead on driving brand and product awareness.

When asked why they plan to implement these changes, the marketers cited changing consumer behavior as the primary driver. While it’s great that marketers are paying attention to trends and changes in how users behave, it’s up to us – user experience advocates – to ensure that the resulting messaging, creative, and placement create a  compelling customer experience and ultimately the business results required. Here at AnswerLab, we use our various research methodologies – from user surveys, to one-on-one interviews, to focus groups – to determine how marketers can provide the best digital experiences for consumers. Read more about what we do on our website.

To read or download the 2011 Digital Marketing Outlook – including the results of the survey I mentioned above – click here.

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Don’t Hide the Bad News: Displaying Side-Effect Information on Pharma Sites

February 16th, 2011 by Sally Cohen

We work with countless companies that aim to portray a positive, helpful image to online audiences through their websites. Amongst these clients are companies in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. A few key factors set our pharma clients’ website needs apart from the other companies we advise, including:

1) the influence of governmental regulation,

2) the life-or-death nature of the information they convey, and

3) the types of audiences they serve, including patients with debilitating or life-threatening illnesses (and/or their caregivers).

Despite the huge role that these factors play in how our pharma clients operate online, we here at AnswerLab advocate for – and advise these clients in how to create – the best experience possible for the user.

And we’ve learned that the best experience sometimes means focusing in on the worst information. We have surveyed, interviewed, and observed patients and caregivers on branded drug websites, and the results all indicate that this audience wants to know the downside of taking a drug, receiving a treatment, or undergoing a therapy. In fact, our research has shown that patients and caregivers prioritize side effect and safety information over nearly any other content on a drug website. Why? This audience wants to know what they’re getting themselves into if their doctor proceeds with treatment. Will the side effects with a new treatment be worse than their current medication? Worse than their condition? Will a new treatment interact with another condition they have or medication they’re taking? While some patients and caregivers want more detailed information (e.g., likelihood or risk of developing a side effect), the universal sentiment is the same: don’t hide the (potentially) bad news.

Interestingly, the pharma companies use a wide range of tactics to display safety and side effect information on their drug sites – not all of which ensure that the user can easily discover this important content.Some place the content at the bottom of the page, others at the very top. Still others put the content in the left or right rail, while some sites display the content in an interactive element such as a shade, automatically scrolling text, or an expanding rollover.

It’s key to keep in mind the target audience for the drug or therapy when designing a new display format for side effect and safety information, for example:

  • Ensure large text size and eliminate auto-scroll for patients with eye diseases.
  • For patients with chronic joint or muscle pain, avoid requiring too many clicks or too much scrolling.

Patients and caregivers can have strong, varying opinions on which formats they prefer (and which they find annoying), so it’s also important to test any new formats for side effect and safety information with target audiences. But it ultimately comes down to meeting their informational needs.

We can’t discount the other target audience for drug websites: Healthcare Professionals. Our research with HCPs indicates that they have very different preferences and needs when they visit pharma sites. See my colleague Lisa Kumpula’s recent post – Meeting the Online Information Needs for Healthcare/Pharma Audiences – to see how the informational needs for HCPs differ from those of patients/caregivers.

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